


storm's a brewin'

by dancer4813



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: And she is perfectly allowed to express them, Character Study, Cuddles, Discussion of Death, Intrusive Thoughts, Keyleth has a lot of emotions, Or at least half of one, Spoilers for 105 - "Fear of Isolation", Tal'dorei Campaign, conflicting emotions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-26
Updated: 2017-07-26
Packaged: 2018-12-07 00:54:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,413
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11612565
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dancer4813/pseuds/dancer4813
Summary: In Terra, the ground shakes around you as you try to sleep.Keyleth had forgotten that, but coming back, the exhaustion of the past couple days setting in, it makes her heart stutter in her chest.Keyleth feels like she’s shaking, but she’s not sure if it’s her or the ground or both.





	storm's a brewin'

**Author's Note:**

> I'm going to preface this fic saying this is a character study of Keyleth's many and varied emotions during Episode 105, "The Fear of Isolation". Some of them are self-depreciating, and while I disagree with some of the things she thinks about herself and her actions, I don't think she's able to see the truth with her current state of mind. 
> 
> With the amount of discourse shouted out over this past week I just wanted to give this contribution in the best way I can - through fic.

In Terra, the ground shakes around you as you try to sleep.

Keyleth had forgotten that, but coming back, the exhaustion of the past couple days setting in, it makes her heart stutter in her chest.

When she had first arrived in Terra, what feels like ages ago, it had been after killing a child, accident or not. For weeks she’d had nightmares about leading her people to their doom, about making the wrong decisions.

Now, she walks into the small house they’d been shown, follows Vax through the doors, and freezes not even two steps in.

There’s only one bed.

She hadn’t considered that.

Keyleth feels like she’s shaking, but she’s not sure if it’s her or the ground or both or just in her head, and she wants to turn tail and run- maybe she can hide in the forest as Minxie, sleep under the stars again – familiar stars of course, not those of the Feywild, and it would be nice, wouldn’t it? To get away for the night, to have a few hours to herself-

“Kiki?”

Vax’s voice, soft, almost breaking with the amount of emotion he is able to stuff into one word, grabs her attention.

She stares for a moment, then shakes her head and drops her gaze.

Not now. She can’t. Not now, when he’s back, when she should be happy for a few more days with him, at the _very_ least.

“Yes?” she murmurs, forcing herself to take one step forward, then another. She wants to talk to him, she does, but she wants to talk just as much as she doesn’t want to, just as much as she can’t bring herself to.

“Ready to crash?”

He gestures to the bed, and it takes all she has to not sprint away from him. So colloquial, so gentle, so considerate despite being something… more than what he was before.

She hadn’t been able to save him, either. Not with the foresight she’d tried to give him, and then she hadn’t even had a chance to gather diamonds to attempt a resurrection ritual.

“Yeah,” she forces out, nodding hurriedly, reaching up to pull off her antlered circlet.

It’s heavy in her hands as she takes it off – the weight of responsibility.

“It’s been a long day, hasn’t it?” Vax murmurs in return, and Keyleth nods again, the tears coming faster.

She hums in response.

He comes closer as she moves away to put her circlet on the bedside table. She winces at her faux-pas as she tries to blink away the blurriness behind her eyes.

“It’s alright,” he assures her, stepping forward again, hand outstretched to touch her arm, but she realizes too late that the shaking isn’t just the ground. It’s her, her skin crawling, and she feels like she might fall apart if he upsets that, so she can’t help it when she shies away from his touch, but he recoils like he’s been burned and _gods_ she feels like a rabbit about to bolt and she _hates_ it.

“Sorry! Sorry,” she says, folding her arms across her chest, feeling goosepimples below her fingers as her stomach twists into knots. “Sorry, I can’t- Everything is a lot right now, you know?”

Keyleth makes the mistake of looking up and seeing Vax’s face, which looks profoundly sad with a hint of pained resignation, and now another loaded helping of guilt is thrown into the cocktail of emotions flooding through her mind.

 _Why can’t I do one fucking thing right?_ she asks herself, and she bites back tears as Vax tilts his head to the side, brow furrowed in concern.

“It’s not you, I promise it’s not you,” she tries to amend. “Well, not just you, but everything happened so fast and it’s only been twenty-four hours since Vecna, and then we were talking to actual _gods_ and apparently Vex and Percy are engaged-”

She cuts herself off before she can go any farther, but there it is, out in the open, and she just _had_ to say it, didn’t she?

 _Fucking stupid – why did you_ have _to bring it up again?_

Her chest is tight and her skin is crawling and the vibration around her is too much – there’s just Too. Much. Going. On.

“Kiki?” Vax asks, cutting through the haze, as he is wont to do.

She can’t bring herself to answer, but she knows he’s seen her like this before. When she drops her gaze and can’t come up with words, he hums in assent, and doesn’t move toward her, doesn’t try to take her by the hands and tell her everything will be alright, because they both know it _won’t_ and it can’t be.

“Let’s talk about this in the morning, shall we?” he asks. “When we’re rested and a little more clear-headed?”

Her breath hitches and she thinks for a moment that her sobs will burst their levees and come rushing out, but she manages to hold herself together. Keyleth nods and Vax murmurs his understanding. Turning away, she changes into her bedclothes silently, taking deep breaths and trying to collect herself.

It works, to an extent.

But when she turns back to the bed, Vax has already slipped beneath the sheets, and they aren’t pulled high enough to cover the top of the wings that stretch across his chest. Those wings claim him. She finds herself rubbing her hands together, thinking of the fire she can conjure at will, and the brand she gave him over a year ago, to help him reclaim what he’d done with the Clasp.

Two brands, two claimants…

What chance does Keyleth have against a goddess?

Her skin still prickles as she walks forward, like a scratchy wool is covering every inch, but instead of the guilt and anger and worry that had filled her only moments ago, she feels only tired.

“Are you gonna join me?” Vax murmurs, and Keyleth nods, not sure what to think or how to feel.

In the morning they can talk things out.

She sits, she lays down. A distant, exhausted piece of her appreciates how Vax knows her well enough to keep his hands to himself, and she feels a sharp stab of grief at what she can already see herself losing.

It takes her a long time to fall asleep.

-

Morning comes with a gentle light peeking through the windows and an arm draped around her waist.

For a few glorious seconds in her groggy state, everything is right. But when she trails her fingers over his chest it is cold to the touch and everything floods back in with the force of a tidal wave.

She tries to let herself relax again – Vax just came back from the dead, and she’s seen just how wearing that can be on her companions. She doesn’t want to wake him up just yet, but it’s hard to release the tension that trails after the anxiety slowly curling into what feels like a tangled ball of yarn deep in her chest.

Keyleth buries her face into her pillow so she doesn’t feel the temptation to look at his face, to try and see something different about him, and that’s when his fingers trail over her spine. His thumb gently ghosts over her skin, rubbing an arc on her back, just below her ribs, he murmurs a groggy “G’morning, Kiki,” as he comes into consciousness.

“Good morning, Vax,” she replies, feeling painfully formal, though he doesn’t seem to notice as he leans forward to press a kiss to her forehead.

She can’t help but flinch at the coolness of his lips, and feels dreadful as he pulls away.

“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry-“

“It’s not your fault, Kiki,” he interrupts, and Keyleth nods into her pillow even though she doesn’t believe him. The Foresight had been her doing, but besides that… Well, inaction was almost worse than action of the wrong sort sometimes.

“I made the choice I did to keep you all safe,” Vax continued. “Like I said while we were still in the Feywild, I did what I did for all of you.”

And there was the problem. She didn’t deny his choice, but she knew that she was, at least, somewhat culpable in him needing to make that choice. Vax’s hand trailed up her back, over her shoulder, and hesitated before his cool palm was laid to rest on her cheek. Her heart felt like breaking at his tenderness, but instead she took his hand in hers and removed it, returning it to his side of the bed as she rolled away to look at the ceiling.

“But once we’re finished you’ll leave. You’ll be gone, with her.”

“Potentially,” he agrees, but she knows better. He would leave them to be with his _Queen_ , instead of staying with his family, with his sister… with Keyleth.

 _Though_ , she thought to herself with a dark chuckle. _Does it even matter if he goes sooner or later, if he was going to go anyway?_

And part of her wants to say no – part of her wants to be strong and enjoy him while he’s still with them. The other part of her wants to see lines crinkle his face, as she had seen after the fight with Kamaljiori. She wants to hear his voice crack with age and see the smile on his face as he watches children run through Zephrah with daggers in hand.

She wants to experience years together.

“You-“ she begins, feeling anger well up within her again, but she is interrupted by a knock at the door.

“Oi, Vax – are you naked?” comes Vex’s voice through the wall.

“Yes.”

Vex chuckles. Keyleth feels like a Skysail caught in a storm, dashed into a tree

She slides off the bed, heading to the door, even as Vex tells him to put some clothes on.

“Keyleth, sorry,” she says, but Keyleth can’t bring herself to accept the apology, not when Vex is here – Vex who preaches forgiveness and who has so much more of a right to be angry than Keyleth does, but who seems to be fine with everything that’s going on. Even though Vex interrupted their conversation and Keyleth feels frustrated, Vex isn’t at fault.

She should be with her brother as much as possible before the end.

Keyleth should let her in.

Waving her hand, the door melts to the side, and Keyleth sees Vex, so much like her brother but with white scales instead of black feathers across her torso, and that coy look in her eye that hadn’t failed to catch Keyleth’s interest in the past.

She realizes she doesn’t know what to say.

“I- I’m dressed,” she says, looking down at her clothes, even if they aren’t her armor. She makes something up about going to get coffee and slips around Vex, but then she’s standing in the middle of Terrah, alone, and she realizes she’s not entirely sure where to find coffee.

“Good job,” she mutters to herself, rubbing her hands down her face.

At least her day can only get better, right?

-

Keyleth’s day does not get better. There’s no time to finish talking to Vax before they leave, and while there’s a wonderful freedom to being at one with the air and the wind while in mist form, the forest around the Pools of Wittebak leads them to Sprigg.

The old gnome is eccentric, he’s amusing, but only until he reveals that all his friends are dead, and that he’s been living alone for thirty some years. That particular fact hits her like a rock elemental’s fist to the gut, and the more he talks the more she realizes she will someday have in common with him. Sprigg rambles about gods and argues with Demitrich, and she finds herself chuckling when everyone else does, but it feels like a constant, looming shadow, harkening back to her nightmares when she first visited Terrah. She wonders just how insane she might be after thirty, eighty, a hundred years alone.

Keyleth wonders what kind of legacy she will leave.

Vax slips his hand into hers partway through their talk with Sprigg, his fingers twining with her own, and despite their chill she squeezes back and tries to put on a brave face. This is her future – she knows that. It’s what she has to look forward to when her friends are long gone and she’s the only one left.

She has to get used to the idea eventually, right?

_People die every day. Except me. That’s my punishment, child. I live on._

But then Sprigg falls to a barrage of arrows from every direction. There’s shouting and the splintering of wood and everything is happening all at once, and she can’t help it – she panics, releasing a burst of a fire storm around the house. A burst of flames appears outside a couple windows, and she feels a sickening wave of pleasure fill her as she hears a scream from one of the attackers outside, quickly followed by the thump of a body hitting the ground.

She taps into her rage, her frustration, remembering what Grog had told her when she had nearly let loose on Raishan, about saving up her anger until she could let it loose. She’d had plenty of frustration compounded over the past few days, from about gods and at gods and at people who were talking to gods…

Keyleth let it consume her, overwhelming the fear and channeling it into power as she let her form shift into that of a fire elemental and tears into the patchwork creatures that had burst through the side of Sprigg’s house.

When they have slopped to the floor and the sounds of battle faded leaving only the crackling of flames in their wake, Keyleth lets her form shrink back into that of herself, breathing hard as adrenaline courses through her system.  
She hears the continued crackle of flames from behind her and, confused, she spins around only to see a whole wall of Sprigg’s cottage in flames.

“Shit,” she mutters, and quickly conjures a tidal wave to rush over the outside of the house, some of it spilling in, and everything getting soaked, leaving only charred wood and sopping books in its wake.

Keyleth stares at it blankly for a moment. Guilt was another emotion she’d felt too often over the past three days.

Not doing enough, doing too much – where did one draw the line?

She regrets springing out some of her most powerful magic right away – even after years of adventuring she hadn’t become an expert at control, always too emotional, always too quick, never thinking enough. Keyleth takes a moment to remember everyone who had died from her mistakes, from the young boy with the Dread Emperor to the dwarves they’d ended up incinerating in Kraghammer, to that older woman who had been with the Broker, after the feast at Uriel’s palace. The devastation of the Pyrah tribe to Thordak, the Air Ashari who had fallen in the Siege of Emon… There were too many lives on her conscience.

She is brought back to herself by Grog clearing a space for Pike and Sprigg and hitting her shoulder with a piece of timber fallen from the roof.

The two of them pray, and Keyleth finds herself begging that she won’t lose someone else.

-

The library is massive – grand on a scale that not even the books in the Cobalt Reserve or the Alabaster Lyceum could hope to match.

Sprigg is alive, still kicking.

Keyleth still hasn’t gotten used to the idea of losing things, losing people, and she feels a vindictive pleasure in her chest, aimed at the cosmos for the life he still has.

_You can’t take him. Not yet._

She wants to spit at the Raven Queen, wants to spite her. But she feels too tired to fight right now, her soul weighed down with the many emotions she’d felt over the course of the day.

Vax’s arm snakes around her shoulder as she scans the shelves.

With all the other things swirling in her mind, Keyleth can’t quite muster up the joy to echo Percy’s, but she understands his excitement. Percy, who’s always hoarded books and stories? Who sees eternity in the stories of humanity?

This is Elysium to him.

He dashes back and forth down the rows, eyes wide, lips pulled in a childish smile she’s never seen on his face before. Vax chuckles beside her, and while she can’t laugh, she can grin as he pulls a tome from the shelf, his face lighting up as he starts to read, flipping to the end of the book before grabbing another, and another.

“They’re people!” he finally exclaims, and even though she feels like she should be confused, Keyleth understands all too well, all too quickly, especially when he starts pulling individual books from the shelves.

Birth, death.

Birth, death, sex.  
Birth, death, some disappointment…

People’s lives compressed into singular tomes.

Her eyes immediately rake over the shelves again, noticing the differing sizes – some wider than her hand, some smaller than the width of her thumb. Tears start falling when she notes a singular tome several inches thick immediately next to a grouping of five or so books that appear no wider than a silver piece.

Percy is delighted.

Keyleth is horrified.

As Percy sprints off again, she pushes gently away from Vax, almost feeling like a ghost as she lets herself drift forward. Worry and a strange, hesitant hope fill her as she trails her fingers across the books, letting her gut tell her which to choose.

The deep green spine follows the tug of her fingers and she holds her breath, but as she opens it to the first page, the language is not one she can decipher.

She flips through, almost as if she thinks there will be pictures. She skips to the end as if there will be an illustration of a Kraken or a bloody battle.

Keyleth finds nothing, and shoves the book back onto the shelf with an angry scoff, tears coming again, faster and thicker. Stepping back from the shelves, she feels a sob break through even as the rest of them start trying to make their way through the shelves. When Vax’s arms wrap around her shoulders her chest fills with the wave of sorrow that feels like it’s been years in the coming.

She lets herself fall apart for a moment, for a few brief seconds, and she turns in his embrace to hold him close.

When the others have all gone, she feels his cool fingers brush away some of her hair, almost as a question, and she nods. Vax brushes away a couple tears and she finishes the job as they start off, following the group and catching up to them down a long row of shelves.

“We had to tell them eventually,” she hears before Vex and Percy’s mouths freeze as they turn around to look at her and Vax.

As if they’re stupid, as if they don’t already know.

Keyleth tells them as much, and after hedging around each other for a moment, the truth comes out.

They are married.

No one knew.

They’re sorry for not letting the rest of Vox Machina know.

_Yeah. Sure._

She calls them liars, because they are. When Scanlan starts to talk she wants to turn into an Earth Elemental and drop-kick him back to the Material Plane.

The itchy thrum of frustration beneath her skin grows, and she hates how impossible she is – how she can never bring herself to have those sorts of conversations with Vax… They’d brought up the concept once, but they’d come to a half-baked conclusion that marriage would change very little.

Keyleth wonders if it’s true, but she guesses she’ll never know.

_Get used to losing things._

_Get used to losing._

“But this place,” Percy starts again, after an awkward silence, and that’s it. She can’t. Can’t be around them and their joy, can’t deal with their inability to see things from her point of view, from Vax’s point of view. She can’t handle their inability to look beyond their own bubble of cheer.

Keyleth already knows how Percy feels, but that doesn’t mean she has to agree.

The fire that sparks to life in her hands is cathartic, and she storms away before she does something she’s going to regret.

**Author's Note:**

> Find more of my headcanons, thoughts, and fic at [dancerwrites](http://www.dancerwrites.tumblr.com/)


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